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Wednesday, August 15, 2012

On Baking Vegan

I love to bake. I really Really REALLY (with all the
superlatives of an 11 year old girl who has just discovered unicorns and
rhythmic gymnastics) love to bake.

My mother is a
fantastic cook, but I am the better baker.
(With the possible exception of the time that I got the tea-towel caught
in the electric hand mixer and we had to scrape cookie batter off of the walls all the way over in the living room. It only happened
once, and shouldn’t still count against me.
Can we let it go?)

While I was growing
up, she and I tag-teamed in the kitchen - I kitchen-maid-ed for her while she
cooked and she kitchen-maid-ed for me while I baked. Our kitchen ran very smoothly and produced
some seriously epic meals, but our system had one failing. It wasn’t apparent at the time, but when I
moved out and began cooking for myself, I discovered that while I was washed
dishes and peeled potatoes, I was failing to learn the intuitive feel for a
casserole or stir-fry that I had for a cake batter.

When Mr Tabubil and
I moved in together, the good meals happened when it was his turn to make
dinner. I could manage a plain roast,
and produce a saucepan of plain steamed rice, but anything else was beyond me.

My magnum opus
happened the evening I got home slightly earlier than Mr Tabubil and decided to
pan-fry a pair of large pork chops I had found in the fridge - and have dinner
ready for him when he got home. Because
I am very nice that way.

I didn’t know much
about meat but I knew that you were supposed to cook pork chops until all the
pink had been cooked away. I hadn’t
realized that it would take so very long to happen – when Mr Tabubil got home
an hour later, the apartment was full of smoke, I was sweaty and cross, the
pork chops were dry as a bone and pure charcoal to a quarter inch depth on
every side, and they were still pink in the middle.

And Mr Tabubil had
to sit down right there in the kitchen doorway to properly appreciate just what
I had done to an extremely nice and extremely expensive pair of prime rib-eye
steaks that he’d been resting in the fridge in anticipation of a really bang-up
Friday dinner.

I didn’t truly learn
how to cook until we moved to Whyalla, in rural South Australia, and began
taking lessons with Saul the cordon bleu chef, who gave me, first and foremost, a basis of technique,
and then, later, the beginning of an understanding. These days I count myself a perfectly capable
cook – in certain things, possibly even slightly better than the
average. But when it comes to baking – I rock.

I do. I really
do. Cakes, brownies, cookies, bars,
soufflés and lamingtons - bring on the sugar and the chocolate and the spices
and the booze and the egg whites and the cream and the butter –!

Which presents me
with certain problems at the moment.
Here in Santiago my social circle includes several vegans, and the dairy
and the eggs - even the sugar - aren’t working anymore, and I’m having real
trouble finding recipes that make palatable alternatives.

I’ve been all over
the internet, and even ordered a book or two, but quite a lot of
vegan-substitute ingredients are unavailable here in Chile, and I’ve found that
even the best regarded recipes are rather hit and miss. I’ve added a moderately decent red-velvet
cake to my repertoire, and an adequate maple-syrup and hazelnut muffin. My vegan friends rave, but not to put too
fine a point on it, most of the vegan recipes I’m making are deeply mediocre.

And Merely
Acceptable is Not How I Roll. Someone
once tried to tell me that not every dessert needs to be a showstopper, and as
far as I’m concerned, they might as well have been speaking Swahili or Bhasa
Indonesia (neither of which I speak.)
If you’re going to invest yourself in a dessert, it had better be worth
every single calorie. Go Big, or Go
Home.

So when I stumbled
onto a vegan recipe for chocolate brownies last month – a recipe that was not
only good by vegan standards, but stood handsomely against most regular brownie
recipes I know, I was ecstatic. (They're
not quite up there with the Best Chocolate Brownies Ever, but very few things in this universe are. Sort of like the Chinese synchronized divers
in the 2012 Olympics. The nations of the
world might duke it out for bronze and silver, but the Chinese divers were diving on another plane
entirely.) And when Alba (who is vegan)
asked me to make her birthday cake, I said ‘Sure! No worries!’ and felt extremely smug and
reckoned that my social cred was going to earn maximum points for the price of
an hour in the kitchen on a Friday afternoon.

These brownies
consist mostly of flour, melted chocolate and home-made applesauce, tossed
together into a bowl, then stirred, and baked for half an hour in the oven. The night before the party, I mixed up a big
double batch and popped them into the
oven, where they completely refused to bake. They wouldn't rise, they wouldn't brown -

They boiled. Mr Tabubil and I watched through
the oven door as they simmered and bubbled, a lake of brown apple stew with
ribbons of chocolate that rose like lava from the depths of the baking pan and
swirled and sank again –

We took them out
after a full hour and threw them into the fridge for the night.

“Maybe” Mr Tabubil
said hopefully, “they’ll harden in there. Like a chocolate cheesecake sort of
thing?”

After a whole night
in the fridge, the brownies remained a liquid.
Of a sort. The sugar in the apple
had caramelized and the alleged brownies had become two pans of a strange, sucking,
toffee-like tar. When I poked at it, my
finger didn’t want to come away. When I
sliced into it, the incisions oozed slowly closed again while I watched, and as
for the taste, Mr Tabubil has fillings in his teeth and I have crowns on mine and neither of
us were silly enough to experiment.

I had a theory. The recipe called for melted chocolate or cocoa powder (eight ounces of each) and possibly – just possibly, I had
misremembered myself and used cocoa powder the first time i made the recipe? And maybe my applesauce had been too
thin? Mr Tabubil nipped off to the shops
to buy up all their cocoa powder while I made up another batch of applesauce, and
we stirred everything together and…

Um.

Eight ounces is
rather more cocoa powder than people might appreciate if they haven’t tried
this themselves - it is finer and
thinner than flour and a little goes a very very long way. The applesauce
melted into it like it had never existed, and I had a mixing bowl that looked
like an overflowing dustbath for chocolate sparrows. I added a cup of soy milk
to wet it down. The cocoa powder didn’t
even notice. I added another cup, and
then I doubled the applesauce. The air in the kitchen was turning brown with floating
cocoa powder, but at last, I had something that approximated at least a bread
dough – if not a cake batter. Good
enough, we reckoned. We threw it into
the oven where it began to rise away happily, like a real cake.

And came out of the
oven with the density of plutonium, and tasting exactly like the bowl of
straight-up cocoa powder that it was.
Edible, it was not.

Mr Tabubil and I had
an afternoon engagement with another couple for an double-bill of back-to-back
superhero movies.

“I think” I sighed
“that I’m not going to make it to the cinema. Give my apologies, will you?”

While Mr Tabubil
went off to watch the new Batman movie, I whipped up an emergency red-velvet cake, and
collapsed limply into bed for a nap. And
got up again to have a shower (my hair was full of cocoa powder, and my arms were
streaked red to the elbows with food coloring from the red-velvet cake. There had been a small accident with the hand-mixer, and the kitchen
looked like an abattoir. Red
food-coloring just keeps on giving.) and dashed off to the Parque
Arauco mall to meet the others for the second movie on the afternoon’s schedule.

And after that we
had to go home and have a nap because we still had to ice the cakes before we got to the birthday party.

I wasn’t at
all sure about the cocoa-powder neutron bomb, but Mr Tabubil made soothing noises and talked me into
taking both.

It was a very nice
party, if slightly schizophrenic. The non-smokers refused to go outside
on the balcony because out there it was freezing. The smokers sat on the small
balcony and froze and refused to come inside at all. At one o'clock in the
morning Alba’s husband Sebastian
orchestrated a détente and turned down the lights and came out with my red
velvet cake and we all sang happy birthday.
It was quite a nice cake. People
smiled a lot and I felt moderately fulfilled on a personal level.

Half an hour later,
Alba sliced up my death-by-cocoa cake and passed that around as well. I
picked up my purse and prepared to do a runner, but glory to the kitchen gods
-

The vegans all dug in with
relish and had a second slice! Which was about what Mr Tabubil had said when he'd talked me into bringing it. "It's going to be pretty boozy party. So bring it. When people get tanked, they'll eat anything."

And now I have a
reputation as an epic-fantastic master baker, based, mostly, as far as I can
tell, on the fact that I actually bake.

About Me

I am an Australian architect, married to a Canadian who followed me home.
In September 2011 we relocated from rural South Australia to the bustling metropolis of Santiago, Chile, where it's warmer than Canada, but less insect-y than Australia.
How's that for a compromise?